Sport has always been television’s most reliable draw. Unlike drama, which can be streamed at leisure, or news, which can be consumed in clips, sport demands live attention. It cannot be spoiled, paused until convenient or reduced to a highlight without losing something essential. That quality has made it the last true fortress of broadcast television, and it is now the centrepiece of one of the most strategically significant battles in global media.
The question I am asked most often, from broadcasters in Europe to platform executives in Asia, is this: Are American sports leagues genuinely gaining ground internationally, or is it marketing noise? Having spent considerable time studying the data across more than 100 markets, my answer is unambiguous. The expansion is real, it is measurable and it is accelerating. But it’s also more complex, and more market-dependent, than the leagues themselves would perhaps like to acknowledge.
The NFL’s decade-long bet on Europe
The NFL’s story in Germany is the clearest illustration of what sustained investment in free-to-air television can achieve. When Pro7 broadcast the first full NFL season in Germany in 2015-16, it reached around 13 million unique viewers. A decade later, following RTL’s acquisition of exclusive free-to-air rights from the 2023-24 season onward, that figure has grown to nearly 23 million.
What is particularly striking is the shift in who is watching. In 2015-16, men age 14-49 accounted for 62% of hours viewed. In 2025-26, that figure has fallen to 34%. The NFL in Germany is no longer a niche property for its traditional demographic. It has become a mainstream television event.
The UK picture is more nuanced. Broadcast hours have grown dramatically, from 1,163 hours in 2015-16 to over 4,000 in 2025-26. Cumulative reach has more than doubled, from 11.3 million to 24.6 million viewers. Yet average live audiences have actually declined slightly. The sport is reaching more people, but the average viewer is spending less time watching live. That is the classic fragmentation challenge with viewers split across more platforms and types of content, ultimately delivering thinner individual audiences.
Asia: A continent of different questions
The Asia story is where the data becomes most instructive, and it requires a different set of questions entirely. In China, a market with 67,000 broadcast hours of sport annually, the NBA reaches a cumulative audience of 271 million. These are extraordinary numbers built over a decade of investment and cultural alignment that no American league has replicated without that long runway.
Japan offers perhaps the most compelling recent case study of how a single athlete can shift the dial for a sport’s international reach. MLB viewing there surged in 2024 and 2025, reaching 680 million hours viewed, a level that dwarfed anything the previous decade had produced and a period that coincides with Shohei Ohtani’s move to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Whether that correlation reflects causation is a question the data alone cannot answer, but the timing is difficult to ignore.
In India, WWE commands the largest US sport TV audience, with 211.2 million viewers watching at least one minute of a program in a season, 30% of them between age 15 and 30. In the Philippines, the NBA Finals regularly achieve market shares above 25%, competing directly with the domestic Philippines Cup for prime-time audiences. This shows the genuine, deep embedding of American sports into local television cultures.
The real playbook for going global
Going international is unambiguously a growth driver for TV sports viewing; the evidence across Europe and Asia confirms it. But the mechanics of that growth vary so significantly by market that a single playbook cannot apply.
In Germany, a decade of consistent free-to-air presence built an NFL audience that now rivals mainstream domestic sport. In Japan, one athlete’s arrival coincided with an MLB viewing surge that a decade of broadcast strategy had failed to produce. In India, WWE built a mass audience not through live sport in any traditional sense, but through the storytelling conventions of entertainment television. In the Philippines, the NBA succeeded by becoming genuinely local, a sport that schoolchildren grow up watching, not a foreign import they discover as adults.
What these trajectories share is not a common strategy, but a common requirement: sustained commitment over time, combined with a willingness to understand what audiences in each market want, rather than assuming they want what American audiences want. Rights deals open doors, but time and local knowledge are what build the audiences that sit behind them.
The data makes it clear that the returns on that investment are real and substantial, but the timeline is measured in years and decades, not broadcast seasons. For those that adopt this approach, the numbers speak for themselves.
Frédéric Vaulpré is senior vice president at Glance, which provides content and audience insights for global media professionals in television and media.
